A driver's ability to stay awake when drowsy or fatigued is sometimes an impossible task and often dangerous. Once drowsiness and fatigue occurs, a driver can experience impaired reaction time, poor vision and bad judgment. The drowsy and fatigued driver can experience problems with information processing and short term memory. By encountering this level of fatigue or drowsiness, the performance of the driver is reduced and they can experience a lack of motivation. Managing risk is an important factor when driving. The driver generally needs to schedule regular stops every 150 miles or 2 hours. Once fatigued the driver should take a 20 minute nap or consume caffeine the equivalent of 2 cups of coffee. Regardless of the education and warnings about drowsy driving, the deaths continue to rise.
Various ways of managing these risks are through alert systems in the vehicle. Alerts provide warning triggers which are developing the patterns and indicating the on-set of sleep. There are a number of methods and technologies which can determine the on-set of sleep. These vary from visual monitoring of the driver's face, to physiological changes to detecting changes in driving performance. These known systems use various types of biometric analysis from analyzing visual conditions of the drivers head and face to sensing the position of the vehicle relative to the road.
See for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,745,031 to Yamamoto; 7,302,327 to Kudo; 6,370,475 to Breed et al.; 6,426,702 to Young et al.; 6,559,770 to Zoerb; and 6,927,694 to Smith et al.
Once these systems detect a fatigue type condition in the driver's appearance and/or when the vehicle is detected moving off the roadway, alarms sound to alert the driver. The alarms have included sound and/or visual indicators. The warnings can sometime be so startling that the alarm can cause an accident.
The current systems can ding, sound a loud horn, vibrate the seat and even use tightening of the seat belt to let the driver know they are having sleep problems. This harsh alarm approach has not been very effective. The alarms have not caught up with the technology which has been developed for the detection of sleep. Once the reporting of fatigue/sleep is triggered, the approach of awakening or the fore warning given to the driver, has not met the same technology sophistication. The transitory nature of the alarm, its associated lack of interaction and the failure of the alarm to provide useful information regarding how to “manage the current situation”, results in the systems being inefficient and under utilized, and often result in the causing of accidents and not avoiding them.
Each year tens of thousands of people are killed on the highways as the direct result of driving in a drowsy or attention compromised condition. Automobile manufacturers are very cognizant of the problem and are investing aggressively in technologies in order to combat the problem and avoid regulation and legal restrictions. To date the focus has been primarily on the detection of unsafe driving performance and to warn the driver. As previously described, these technologies span from camera's embedded in dashboard to watch for drooping eyes to cameras that detect lane departure swerving. These technologies can generally alert the driver of the situation, with the naïve belief that such a warning will be a wake-up call to the driver to either alter their behavior or get off the road. There is unfortunately a fundamental flaw is their logic. While an alarm may provide a temporary warning, it neither alters nor manages the situation. Once the driver has been warned, the same distractions are still available and the fatigue state remains and may return and elevate. While such an alert will temporarily increase the state of alertness and attention of the driver, there is nothing to sustain the state. Considering that the driver is unable to take any immediate action to alleviate the situation, an alarm without a situational management process will prove ineffective with regards to the majority of fatigue situations.
The current fatigue driving alarm systems that are being introduced in consumer automobile currently, suffer from a variety of problems. First is the driver perceived “false positive”. Most drivers will not readily admit they are driving in an unsafe condition; rationalizing it was just an isolated momentary event. The sensitivity of the alarm system must be set to detect fatigue early enough for it to be effective from a safety perspective, but this is likely to cause frequent annoying alarming to the driver, even though the driver is in a dangerous situation. Drivers in such a circumstance are likely to turn-off or disable the system, leaving themselves completely unprotected and vulnerable. A safety system that is turned off is not a safety system.
The action of alarming the driver can increase the danger and potential of an accident. This results due to the physiological effects that an alarm has in an irresolvable constrained environment such as an automobile. An unexpected alarm during fatigue causes an immediate surge of adrenaline into the blood stream, reflecting the body's fight or flight response to such stimuli. Since the driver's actions are constrained by the situation, they can't or won't simply pull over and stop the car, they will continue to drive. Now the metabolic pendulum swings in the opposite direction and the body responds by rapidly over compensating from the hormonal stimulation leaving the driver to a potentially lower attention state than before. Unless the driver is able to take immediate action, which under the circumstance is unlikely, the driver will oscillate between the extremes of adrenaline stimulation from the alarm to metabolic crash, with the average performance trend declining rapidly.
Thus, the need exists for solutions to the above problems with the prior art.